A Conjecture Regarding the Biological Mechanism of Subjectivity and Feeling

ABSTRACTS

Louis C. Charland

The Heat of Emotion: Valence and the Demarcation Problem

Philosophical discussions regarding the status of emotion as a scientific
domain usually get framed in terms of the question whether emotion is a
natural kind. That approach to the issues is wrongheaded for two reasons.
First, it has led to an intractable philosophical impasse that ultimately
misconstrues the character of the relevant debate in emotion science. Second,
and most important, it entirely ignores valence, a central feature of emotion
experience, and probably the most promising criterion for demarcating emotion
from cognition and other related domains. An alternate philosophical hypothesis
for addressing the issues is proposed. It is that emotion is a naturally
occurring valenced phenomenon that is variously modifiable by psychological
and cultural circumstances. This proposal should improve the chances for
collaboration between philosophical and scientific researchers interested
in emotion, something that has been notoriously absent from the present
‘debate’, which has mostly been a philosopher’s game.

Giovanna Colombetti

Appraising Valence

‘Valence’ is used in many different ways in emotion theory. It generally
refers to the ‘positive’ or ‘negative’ character of an emotion, as well
as to the ‘positive’ or ‘negative’ character of some aspect of emotion.
After reviewing these different uses, I point to the conceptual problems
that come with them. In particular, I distinguish: problems that arise
from conflating the valence of an emotion with the valence of its aspects,
and problems that arise from the very idea that an emotion (and/or its
aspects) can be divided into mutually exclusive opposites. The first group
of problems does not question the classic dichotomous notion of valence,
but the second does. In order to do justice to the richness of daily emotions,
emotion science needs more complex conceptual tools.

Ralph D. Ellis

The Roles of Imagery and Meta- emotion in Deliberate Choice and Moral Psychology

Understanding the role of emotion in reasoned, deliberate choice — particularly
moral experience — requires three components: (a) Meta-emotion, allowing
self-generated voluntary imagery and/or narratives that in turn trigger
first-order emotions we may not already have, but would like to have for
moral or other reasons. (b) Hardwired mammalian altruistic sentiments,
necessary but not sufficient for moral motivation. (c) Neuropsychological
grounding for what Hume called ‘love of truth,’ with two important effects
in humans: (i) generalization of altruistic feelings beyond natural sympathy
for conspecifics; and (ii) motivation to inquire into moral/political/psychological
truth without automatic, a priori commitment to specific action tendencies
— to avoid trivializing ethical and social choices. After deliberation,
the desired behaviour is then triggered by using meta-emotion and voluntary
imagery to ‘pull up’ and habituate the needed first-order emotions. The
neuropsychological basis for Hume’s ‘love of truth’ is traced to Panksepp’s
‘seeking system’ in combination with some prefrontal executive capacities.

Peter Goldie

Imagination and the Distorting Power of Emotion

In real life, emotions can distort practical reasoning, typically in ways
that it is difficult to realise at the time, or to envisage and plan for
in advance. This feature of real life emotional experience raises difficulties
for imagining such experiences through centrally imagining, or imagining
‘from the inside’. I argue instead for the important psychological role
played by another kind of imagining: imagining from an external perspective.
This external perspective can draw on the dramatic irony involved in imagining
these typical cases, where one knows outside the scope of the imagining
what one does not know as part of the content of what one imagines: namely,
that the imagined emotion is distorting one’s reasoning. Moreover, imagining
from an external perspective allows one to evaluate the imagined events
in a way that imagining from the inside does not.

Correspondence: Email: Peter.Goldie@Manchester.ac.uk

Marc D. Lewis & Rebecca M. Todd

Getting Emotional: A Neural Perspective on Emotion, Intention, and Consciousness

Intentions and emotions arise together, and emotions compel us to pursue
goals. However, it is not clear when emotions become objects of awareness,
how emotional awareness changes with goal pursuit, or how psychological
and neural processes mediate such change. We first review a psychological
model of emotional episodes and propose that goal obstruction extends the
duration of these episodes while increasing cognitive complexity and emotional
intensity. We suggest that attention is initially focused on action plans
and their obstruction, and only when this obstruction persists does focal
attention come to include emotional states themselves. We then model the
self-organization of neural activities that hypothetically underlie the
evolution of an emotional episode. Phases of emotional awareness are argued
to parallel phases of synchronization across neural systems. We suggest
that prefrontal activities greatly extend intentional states while focal
attention integrates emotional awareness and goal pursuit in a comprehensive
sense of the self in the world.

Jaak Panksepp

On the Embodied Neural Nature of Core Emotional Affects

Basic affects reflect the diversity of satisfactions (potential rewards/reinforcements)
and discomforts (punishments) that are inherited tools for living from
our ancestral past. Affects are neurobiologically-ingrained potentials
of the nervous system, which are triggered, moulded and refined by life
experiences. Cognitive, information-processing approaches and computational
metaphors cannot penetrate foundational affective processes. Animal models
allow us to empirically analyse the large-scale neural ensembles that generate
emotional-action dynamics that are critically important for creating emotional
feelings. Such approaches offer robust neuro-epistemological strategies
to decode the fundamental nature of affects in all mammals, including humans,
but they remain to be widely implemented. Here I summarize how we can develop
a cross-species affective neuroscience that probes the neural nature of
emotional affective states by studying the instinctual emotional apparatus
of the mammalian body and brain. Affective feelings and emotional actions
may reflect the dynamics of the primal viscero-somatic homunculus of SELF-representation.

Jesse Prinz

Are Emotions Feelings?

The majority of emotion researchers reject the feeling theory of emotions;
they deny that emotions are feelings. Some of these researchers admit that
emotions have feelings as components, but they insist that emotions contain
other components as well, such as cognitions. I argue for a qualified version
of the feeling theory. I present evidence in support William James’s conjecture
that emotions are perceptions of patterned changes in the body. When such
perceptions are conscious, they qualify as feelings. But the bodily perceptions
constituting emotions can occur unconsciously. When that occurs, emotions
are unfelt. Thus, emotions are feelings when conscious, and they are not
feelings when unconscious. In the end of the paper, I briefly sketch a
theory of how emotions and other perceptual states become conscious.

Matthew Ratcliffe

The Feeling of Being

There has been much recent philosophical discussion concerning the relationship
between emotion and feeling. However, everyday talk of ‘feeling’ is not
restricted to emotional feeling and the current emphasis on emotions has
led to a neglect of other kinds of feeling. These include feelings of homeliness,
belonging, separation, unfamiliarity, power, control, being part of something,
being at one with nature and ‘being there’. Such feelings are perhaps not
‘emotional’. However, I suggest here that they do form a distinctive group;
all of them are ways of ‘finding ourselves in the world’. Indeed, our sense
that there is a world and that we are ‘in it’ is, I suggest, constituted
by feeling. I offer an analysis of what such ‘existential feelings’ consist
of, showing how they can be both ‘bodily feelings’ and, at the same time,
part of the structure of intentionality.

Correspondence: Email: m.j.ratcliffe@durham.ac.uk

David Rudrauf and Antonio Damasio

A Conjecture Regarding the Biological Mechanism of Subjectivity and Feeling

In this article we present a conjecture regarding the biology of subjectivity
and feeling, based on biophysical and phenomenological considerations.
We propose that feeling, as a subjective phenomenon, would come to life
as a process of resistance to variance hypothesized to occur during the
unfolding of cognition and behaviours in the wakeful and emoting individual.
After showing how the notion of affect, when considered from a biological
standpoint, suggests an underlying process of resistance to variance, we
discuss how vigilance, emotional arousal and attentional behaviours reflect
a dynamics of controlled over-excitation related to cognitive integration
and control. This can be described as a form of resistance to variance.
We discuss how such a dynamics objectively creates an internal state of
tension and affectedness in the system that could be associated with subjective
states. Such a dynamics is shaped by the system’s need to cope with its
own inertia, to engage in intentional behaviours, attend, preserve coherence,
grapple with divergent cognitive, emotional and motivational tendencies,
and delayed auto-perturbations of the brain-body system. More generally,
it is related to the need to respect the hierarchy of the various influences
which affect its internal dynamics and organization.

Correspondence: Email: david_rudrauf@hotmail.com

James A. Russell

Emotion in Human Consciousness Is Built on Core Affect

This article explores the idea that Core Affect provides the emotional
quality to any conscious state. Core Affect is the neurophysiological state
always accessible as simply feeling good or bad, energized or enervated,
even if it is not always the focus of attention. Core Affect, alone or
more typically combined with other psychological processes, is found in
the experiences of feeling, mood and emotion, including the subjective
experiences of fear, anger and other so-called basic emotions which are
commonly (but on this account, not) thought to be raw, primitive, and universal
emotional qualia.

Francisco J. Varela and Natalie Depraz

At the Source of Time: Valence and the constitutional dynamics of affect

This paper represents a step in the analysis of the key, but much-neglected
role of affect and emotions as the originary source of the living present,
as a foundational dimension of the moment-to-moment emergence of consciousness.
In a more general sense, we may express the question in the following terms:
there seems to be a growing consensus from various sources — philosophical,
empirical and clinical — that emotions cannot be seen as a mere ‘coloration’
of the cognitive agent, understood as a formal or un-affected self, but
are immanent and inextricable from every mental act. How can this be borne
out, beyond just announcing it? Specifically, what is the role of affect-emotion
in the self-movement of the flow, of the temporal stream of consciousness?

Douglas F. Watt

Social Bonds and the Nature of Empathy

Considerations stemming from a basic taxonomy of emotion suggest that the
creation of social bonds is a critical domain for affective neuroscience.
A critical phenomenon within this group of processes promoting attachment
is empathy, a process essential to mitigation of human suffering, and for
both the creation and long term stability of social bonds. Models of empathy
emerging from cognitive and affective neuroscience show widespread confusion
about cognitive versus affective dimensions to empathy. Human empathy probably
reflects admixtures of more primitive ‘affective resonance’ or contagion
mechanisms, melded with developmentally later-arriving emotion identification,
and theory of mind/perspective taking. From these considerations, a basic
model of affective empathy is generated as a gated resonance induction
of the internal distress of another creature, with an intrinsic motivation
to relieve the distress. It is ‘gated,’ in that at least four classes of
hypothesized variables determine intensity of an empathic response to the
suffering of another. Differential predictions of this model vs. current
ones, and future tests are proposed.